


Never Did Run Smooth

by c3mf



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Angst, Arthur Shappey is a wonderful human being, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Past Abuse, Romance, Trust Issues, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-12
Updated: 2012-12-12
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:45:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/c3mf/pseuds/c3mf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one ever said it would be easy, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying anyway.</p><p>Written for the Cabin Pressure fic meme <a href="http://cabinpres-fic.dreamwidth.org/4207.html?thread=6385775#cmt6385775">here</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Did Run Smooth

It starts with a cup of coffee.

Arthur doesn’t care that it tastes like burnt rubber and dirty socks, it’s quick and easy and hot enough to wake him up before the chaps arrive so he can do the hoovering.

Only he forgets his wallet. He wanders all the way up to the till before he finally realizes it’s missing. In a panic, he clutches the paper cup in his teeth and proceeds to pat himself down. Maybe he still has a quid in his shoe beneath where the lining is peeling away from the sole?

He hops on one foot, trying to wrench his shoe loose without taking it off completely whilst at the same time trying to keep the rest of his coffee from sloshing over the lip of the cup and onto his shirtfront. 

“Are you all right?” someone asks.

He freezes mid-contortion to glance up at the girl at the register.

“Looking for money,” he tries to explain, but it comes out garbled by the Styrofoam in his mouth. He straightens, pulls out the cup and repeats himself.

“Just the one?” she asks.

Sheepishly, he nods.

“On the house.” She smiles and waves away his protests before he can properly get them out. Then she leans across the worktop towards him and drops her voice low in a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s awful, but it does the trick, doesn’t it?”

The panic evaporates and he can’t help but smile back. Somehow having someone else think the coffee is horrid is brilliant—because it really is just _awful_ —and maybe drinking it despite that isn’t such an odd thing after all. It’s like a secret between them now, shared with a shy glance and an easy laugh.

It isn’t anything as bewilderingly complex as two halves finding their compliments and becoming whole. There is no overwhelming breathlessness in the presence of all-encompassing perfection nor is there the electric and energizing jolt of being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

It’s a first meeting, a singular impression, instantaneous and indelible.

It’s something new looking to grow.

~*~

The girl in the canteen is called Keely. Arthur quite likes the way her name sits on his tongue, enjoys the rhythm and the cadence of it. It curls up right behind his teeth and the sharp sound of it pulls his lips into a smile. That’s why he likes it, he thinks, because you can’t help but smile when you say it, and how brilliant is that?

But the thing he likes most about it, though, is the way she smiles when he says it.

~*~

For the longest time Keely thinks Arthur is a joke. No one on earth can be so enthusiastically optimistic or perpetually cheery. Yet every time she sees him he is only infectious grins and anecdotes shared simply to make her laugh. There is no possible way anyone can be so positively sweet and so very, very kind. Those sorts of people don’t exist, so she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Secretly, though, she hopes it never does.

~*~

It’s Monday morning, bright and early, and there is no coffee in the portacabin. It’s becoming a habit now that whenever anyone fancies having a cuppa, mysteriously , there is none to be had. 

Martin closes the empty cupboard with a mournful sigh.

“Something wrong, Skip?” Arthur asks from where he’s sprawled on the sofa.

Despondently, Martin drops back into his desk chair and starts in on the paperwork, still sluggish and caffeine-less. “No coffee in,” he says, already feeling the lethargy settle in his bones.

All at once, Arthur rolls to his feet and practically bounds to the door. “Canteen should be open,” he chirps, the words practically tripping over themselves in his haste to get them out. “I’ll just go and fetch some, shall I?”

Before Martin can pull out his wallet, let alone blink, Arthur disappears out the door in an overeager blur. Martin watches him dash across the airfield through the window and can’t help but think there’s something he’s missing entirely.

Then he reminds himself that this is Arthur and if there isn’t something missing, it could very well be the first sign of the apocalypse.

~*~

When Martin and Douglas at last voice a complaint to Carolyn about the coffee’s mysterious absence, she stills for a fraction of second. Then all at once the hesitation is gone and she breezes into her office with a flippant, “You’re both grown men. Surely, you know how to do the shopping?” thrown over her shoulder.

She slams the door behind her.

~*~

Carolyn isn’t blind. She knows infatuation when she sees it and reading Arthur has always been distressingly easy (whether the ease comes from being his mother or his own transparency, she doesn’t know and suspects the answer doesn’t matter). The boy wears his heart on his sleeve and sometimes she hates it. That sort of openness makes it so very easy to hurt people, and whilst she has absolute faith in him, she has none in the kindness of strangers. 

When she spies an unfamiliar girl’s smile over his shoulder as he sketches at the kitchen table, she gears herself up for the inevitable. 

“What’s this one’s name?” she finally asks. 

She can only imagine—another pony club-type snob not worth a minute of his time. One who he will follow around like a lovesick hound—because when he gives his devotion, he doesn’t go halves—until one day she tosses him aside for a smug git with pots of money and a posh car screaming of inadequacy. Her only comfort comes from the fact the pair will deserve each other, utterly and completely, and in the end they’ll both self-destruct. The knowledge is grimly satisfying in the way most truths are.

But Arthur, bless him, has never suffered honesty the way she has. He glances up from his sketchpad, from the charcoal face of an unfamiliar girl, and the smile he gives her is dazzling.

“Keely,” he says and the name on his lips pulls his smile wider.

Totally, irrevocably smitten.

She gives the sketch on the table another cursory glance then relents with a sigh. “At least this one isn’t wearing an Alice band.”

Arthur just laughs and goes back to spilling his heart onto the page.

The only thing Carolyn can do is shake her head and brace herself, just as she has for every break-up before and just as she will for every break-up after.

Because her boy may come back to her breaking, but she’ll be damned if she’ll ever let him be broken.

~*~

As with all things, Douglas solves the case of the missing coffee by way of simply bringing in his own. 

“I refuse to buy that complete rubbish Carolyn forces on us,” he explains as Arthur stands at his elbow watching, nearly vibrating with anxious energy, “And if I have to resort to brining in my own coffee, I’m not going to have it wasted either, when we only need to make half a batch.” He gives Arthur a pointed look which, of course, Arthur is pointedly oblivious to.

Instead, Arthur shuffles in place. “You don’t have to, Douglas,” he says lamely. “I don’t mind running to the canteen, honestly. It’s not any trouble.”

“Trouble it may not be,” says Douglas, “but I’d rather not suffer through another day of that sludge the canteen tries to pass off as coffee.”

“Besides,” Martin says. “It was eating a hole in your wallet. Not that it wasn’t nice of you to always offer,” he adds quickly.

“Yeah, I suppose so. But still…”

“It’s fine.” Douglas finishes the coffee with a flourish and pushes a steaming mug into Arthur’s hands. “Next round is your round.”

Arthur curls his hands around his cup and the corners of his mouth droop into a distracted frown as he stares into his drink.

After a moment, Douglas sighs. “I’ll show you once more, all right?”

Arthur just nods and sips at his coffee.

~*~

By lunch, Arthur is a jittery mess.

He alternates between pacing around the portacabin, fast enough to practically wear a groove in the lino, and slumping down onto the sofa, jiggling his knees and drumming his fingers on the seat cushions.

He’s on his twelfth circuit of the room, and despite the now constant and delicious supply of grade A brew, the metronomic _squeak-click squeak-click_ of his shoes is driving Martin absolutely mad. (Douglas, damn him, doesn’t seem to notice at all.) Martin glowers at Douglas over the desktop as though Arthur’s pacing were all his doing. When Douglas finally deigns to acknowledge Martin’s staring he only raises one slightly curious and infinitely imperious brow in response.

Martin cuts his eyes accusingly towards Arthur. Douglas simply shrugs and returns to scrolling through his phone. His go, it seems. Martin sighs and sits back in his chair. 

“Arthur?” he says. Automatically, Arthur freezes and pivots on his heel towards Martin.

“Yeah, Skip?”

“Could you please not do that anymore?”

“Do what?”

“Act like a crazed monkey on the peak of a sugar high.”

Arthur blinks, then turns to Douglas for confirmation, as he usually does when he feels he’s missed something.

With two pairs of eyes pinned on him, Douglas puts down his phone with an entirely too put upon sigh. 

“You _do_ seem wound a bit tight,” says Douglas, at length.

“Oh. Do I?”

“Yes.”

Arthur gives them both a wobbly smile and scratches sheepishly at the back of his neck. “Sorry, chaps. It’s just… I’m… I’ll just sit down. I won’t be a bother anymore, promise.” Without another word, he settles himself back on the sofa.

The steady sound of Arthur’s pacing is replaced by the rhythmic drumming of his fingers.

~*~

To say Arthur is distracted would be a grievous understatement. An atrociously abominable misattribution to ever befoul God or man, to be precise.

Douglas is instantly intrigued. Picking his way to the bottom of secrets that aren’t his has always been one of his favorite pastimes. It doesn’t matter how innocuous or mundane the secret either, so long as he is the one to unearth it first.

There isn’t any hope for Arthur keeping his secrets closely guarded, however.

If Douglas wants the satisfaction of first discovery, he needs to work quickly, even though it will lead him to a revelation he won’t have time to savor and then he’ll fall right back into the arms boredom that will make him want to boil his own eyeballs. 

Ah well, he thinks, a distraction is a distraction. But first things first.

He pulls a fiver from his wallet and waves it at Arthur. “How would you like to do me a favor?” he asks. Arthur is on his feet in a flash, instantly energized. “Get me a packet of crisps, will you?”

Arthur grins like a punch-drunk fool. “Righto, Douglas! Back in a tic.” He snatches the note and bounds out the door.

Douglas can’t help but think he’s just given Arthur his blessing.

~*~

Arthur doesn’t come back for nearly two hours, but when he does he is in a giddy daze and conspicuously empty handed.

All at once, the mystery loses its luster. Douglas can’t help but shake his head. How could he not have seen it before? He recognized the look on his own face often enough, back when he was young and things mattered and feeling alone could sustain him.

But Arthur is young and his world means everything, and he lives every day in emphatic brilliance.

New love is a blinding thing.

~*~

By the time GERTI lands after their latest long-haul flight, it’s completely dark and everyone is thoroughly exhausted. Mum is the first to leave, sweeping off the plane in a flurry of sharp jerks and pointed, mumbled words. Arthur knows by the time he makes it outside her car will already be long gone. The flight was a nightmare and the passenger were all rude, thieving, sly and a load of other adjectives that don’t bear repeating. 

Douglas disappears not long after with a wordless goodbye and takes the last of the stormy silence with him. Arthur tidies up what little can be tidied without breaking into the cupboard. Skip stays in the flight deck a while and doesn’t come out until the last of the tension has ebbed away. 

Together, they lock up GERTI and walk out to their cars. They don’t say much more than goodbye to each other when they part ways (although Arthur knows when Skip turns around to wave he’s actually checking to make certain Arthur has his keys, and obligingly Arthur makes certain they’re in his hand when he waves back so Skip can see).

The lighting is yellowing and sparse and pools in little circles, creating islands of shadows to navigate through. It’s difficult to make out Skip and the van, but he can hear the grinding-clank of it starting up well enough. The bright flare of taillights blinks on across the car park just as he reaches his car.

He fumbles with his keys, squinting down at his hands because he didn’t remember to park under a lamppost, feeling for the lock with his fingertips until the key catches and slides home. He’s just about to climb behind the wheel when he hears the rhythmic growl of an engine turning over. It rumbles once, twice, then peters out in a miserable little wheeze. He straightens as the engine turns over yet again, and tries to discern what darkness is just darkness and what might actually be the shadowy lump of car. 

The engine cuts off and he sees a sliver of movement before a door slams and a cry of frustrated disgust echoes off the hangars. 

“Everything okay over there?” he calls. 

The smear of darkness ahead of him stills very suddenly and for a moment there is utter silence. Then comes a tentative, “Arthur?” and all the coiling tension he hadn’t known was even there drains from his shoulders. He grabs his keys and picks his way over the gravel until the shadow melts into Keely, huddled up next to a beat-up old Nova that might be blue or green or even red.

She’s standing ramrod straight, keys fisted into dangerous points between her fingers. That’s when he realizes he never answered her, and with the light as poor as it is, she might not even see that it’s him. 

“It’s me,” he says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

All at once, the stony stillness dissipates and the line of her shoulders relaxes. “You didn’t,” she tells him and he thinks he sees her try to smile. He doesn’t bother pointing out that she’s still clutching her keys like they’re tiny, jagged knives. 

“You’re here late,” he says instead. 

She shrugs and ducks her head awkwardly, throwing a glare at her car. “Stupid thing won’t start.”

“Well, we’ll just have to fix that, won’t we?” he says, and when she looks up he gives her the most reassuring smile he can manage. “I’ll go get my leads.”

When she smiles back at him it’s small and reserved, but it’s enough to bleed every last drop of exhaustion from his bones.

~*~

He may not be tired anymore, but he feels like a right prat when he digs through the boot of his car and his jump leads are nowhere to be found.

~*~

Somehow having a passenger means he doesn’t fiddle with the radio. They ride in silence, broken only by Keely’s occasional murmured directions. The air is tense and nervous, crowding in his lungs and knotting his muscles tight. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel to channel out all the restless energy humming under his skin, but it doesn’t help.

Talking with her now shouldn’t be any different than talking with her in the canteen, but for some confusingly backwards reason it really, really is. His insides are tangled in great ruddy snarls, all jumbled and uncomfortably tight. There are butterflies creeping up from his stomach to fly circles behind his ribcage and flutter wildly in his throat. 

But no matter how hard he tries he can’t figure out _why_.

The silence drags on and instead of drowning it out, the steady _tha-thump tha-thump_ of his fingers only makes it louder, leaves it hanging between them, gaping wide and deep and horrifically unbreakable. The weight of it is awkward and oppressive. It steals his words away before they ever make it to his tongue.

To distract himself, he catches glimpses of her out of the corner of his eyes, but they’re too quick and unfocused. After a while, what he can’t see frustrates him more. He wants to turn and simply watch, wants to drink up every detail and tuck the memory of it away. There’s an urgency to the want, an insistence that nags at his good sense and tells him he is missing something important, something stolen and secret that he might never see again. 

The knots in him pull taut and the butterflies stage a rebellion.

But he knows better than to sneak glances whilst he drives. He keeps his hands at ten and two, his eyes forward, and is proud of himself for not giving into the temptation.

If, when they idle at a traffic stop, he notes the way the dash lights illumine her eyes or how the amber-gold of the streetlights caress her cheekbones, that’s another matter entirely.

~*~

Arthur is the quietest Keely has ever known him to be (which, admittedly, isn’t very long at all, and yet somehow, inexplicably, is more than enough). There must be something wrong, she thinks, for him to be so lost in thought, and so she lets the silence linger as long as she’s able. She speaks only when necessary and resolves not to be any more of an inconvenience than she already has been.

~*~ 

The house is just the same as all the others lining the street, aging and quaint, faded brick with a red door, chipped and flaking with paint. The silence is stifling now, screaming underneath his skin and he can feel the weight of every word he hasn’t spoken clawing its way inside his throat. 

He is going to burst. 

Flexing his fingers around the steering wheel until his knuckles go white is the only thing that keeps him together.

Keely gathers up her things quietly as can be and murmurs, “Thank you.”

When he turns it isn’t to tell her it wasn’t any trouble (though in all honesty it really wasn’t). There isn’t anything to divide his attention now, so he gives it over to her wholly, and all the incessant clamoring inside his brain dies down when he gets a proper look at her.

Her skin is gilded in the streetlamps, the lights haloing her hair so that she glows, and shadows gather about her face to sharpen her eyes and round out the contours of her face. The dark makes her delicate and fragile, a fine-boned thing meant to be handled with care and cherished. He can’t imagine needing anything else. 

He wants to reach out and touch her, trace the line of her cheekbones with his fingertips and cradle the softness of her jaw in his hands. The turned-up tilt of her nose, the rounded bow of her lips, the curve of her ears hidden in the curls of her hair… Each and every one of them begs to be mapped and consigned to memory. They should be treasured.

He wants her to let him.

“Would you like to go out?” he says. With the silence shattered, the words tumble out of him, like a dam breaking. “I mean, we are out, obviously, but I meant some other time that wasn’t now, because going out now would just be silly. Well, not silly because I don’t want to— I do—but silly because maybe you don’t. But what I meant was, properly, with dinner and things. And me. During sometime that isn’t now.”

She stares at him unblinking.

Sheepishly, he regards his knuckles and knows he’s made a hash of things.

“I’d like that,” she says. When he glances over the smile she gives him is teasing and shy. “Sometime that isn’t now. With you.”

He has never heard anything so perfect.

~*~

Proper, Arthur realizes later, is just another word for boring. That won’t do. Why make things proper when you can make them _special?_

~*~

Arthur stands outside the door to Keely’s flat, wrestling with his nerves.

The collar of his shirt is entirely too starched, scratching against his neck, and making him itch. His palms are clammy, his insides are tangled in knots, and there is so much pressure humming under his skin he can’t decide if he’s excited or going to be sick.

Then the door opens and he forgets how to breathe.

She’s wearing a dress that clings to her in all the right places and gives him quite a nice view of the long line of her legs. Her hair is like spun-gold, done up in that messily-precise way women seem so good at, leaving it falling just so around her face and over her eyes. Her lips are red and glistening, full and ripe, and he wonders if he were to kiss her now if she would taste like sweet cherries. She glances up at him from under her lashes and her fringe and he’s struck by her eyes, the color of stained glass under water, darker and larger than he ever remembers them being. 

The urge to touch her is suddenly overwhelming. He wants to run his fingers through her hair, trace the line of her collarbone just above the swooping neckline of her dress, put his hands on her hips and see if her curves fit perfectly into his hands. 

“Wow,” he breathes.

She blossoms under his approval, lowered eyes and a demure smile. He has never seen anything more beautiful, and he tells her so.

When she looks up, color darkens her cheeks. 

He can’t help but feel a little disappointed when she pulls on her coat.

~*~

The further from the city centre he drives, the more anxious she gets. 

“Just a bit further,” he promises.

She nods politely, but isn’t entirely convinced.

~*~

Her confusion when he pulls into the airfield is palpable. He parks outside the portacabin like normal and pops open the boot.

“Arthur,” she says hesitantly. “We’re not meant to be here after hours.” So what on earth are we doing here, remains unspoken.

“It’s all right,” he assures her as he gathers up what he needs. “Worked it all out with the ground crew. They know we’re here.” He checks that his keys are in his pocket and closes the boot with a click.

When she notices the basket looped over his arm and the blanket draped over his shoulder, she just blinks and raises an eyebrow.

~*~

The climb over the crumbing bit of fence separating the field from the tarmac is more of a job than he imagined it being. Then again, he never imagined her following him over in a well-fitted dress and a pair of precarious high heels either.

“Sorry,” he says, holding out his arm as she wobbles, half so she can balance, half so he can catch her if she falls. “Probably should have said something about shoes and dresses and things, but I wanted it to be a surprise.”

She takes an impressive leap off the fence and stumbles into his side when she lands. Reflexively, he curls his arm around her waist to steady her.

“It still is,” she whispers.

It is a long time before either of them pull away.

~*~

Dinner isn’t much more than some cold sandwiches, some crisps, tea and pineapple juice. (The Toblerones he keeps at the bottom of the basket for later.) He knows it isn’t very much and that leaning the torch up against the basket is a poor substitute for candlelight, but even still she smiles at him from across the blanket and promises him that everything is delicious.

A while later, after he has cleared away the rubbish, he stretches out on the blanket to stare up at the stars, pleasantly full of food and tingling with the warmth of hot tea. It’s quiet out, the last of the planes flown in hours ago, and the only artificial light he can see is coming from the ATC tower. It isn’t bright enough to take away from the sky, velvet-dark and cloudless and bursting with starlight. He wonders if he painted the ceiling of his bedroom, if he could ever get it to be this pretty. No, he decides, probably not. The stars are too lovely to keep shut up in his room anyway. They need to be shared.

He’s so lost in picking out the shadowed blues and purples that he doesn’t notice Keely is lying down beside him until she says, “I don’t think I’ve ever taken the time to look at them before.”

When he turns his head, she is staring up at the sky in dreamy wonderment. So close that he can see the stars reflected in her eyes, close enough to touch. There is a ghost of heat from her hand beside his on the blanket.

“They’re beautiful,” she says. “Like diamonds.”

“Picture yourself in a boat on a river,” he sings.

Beside him, Keely giggles and he doesn’t stop singing until she’s joined in. He brushes his hand against her and when she doesn’t pull away he gently braids his fingers with hers.

“Do I have kaleidoscope eyes?” she asks teasingly. Her smile is infectious.

He runs his thumb over her knuckles and regards her as solemnly as he possibly can. “I don’t know,” he says. “You’re too far away to tell.”

She shifts closer, so she’s nearly pressing herself against his side, and props herself up on her elbow to lean over him. “What about now?”

“Still too far,” he tells her. 

She inches closer, enough so he can smell her perfume, fresh earth and vanilla and smoky autumn-stoked fires. There are shadows in her eyes now instead of stars, but somehow that makes them all the more inviting. 

“Now?” she breathes.

He cranes his neck to kiss her, lets her warmth seep into him from her lips and their tangled fingers. He doesn’t say anything when he settles back, but then he doesn’t think he needs to. Without a word, they rearrange themselves so she can lay her head against his shoulder and lie in his arms. He rests his hand over her hip and the curve of it fits perfectly into his palm. 

Together, they lie watching the stars until the cold finally chases them back to the car. 

~*~

There are proper dinners after that, with tables and chairs and food that doesn’t come packaged in little paper boxes. There are kisses, stolen in secret at the airfield or exchanged over a candleless supper. 

None of it compares.

He paints a picture of their starry night from memory and stands on a chair in her flat to tape it to the ceiling. They make a picnic over Chinese takeaway in the middle of her sitting room, and when they lie down to watch the paper stars, they fall asleep curled in each other’s arms and don’t wake up until dawn.

~*~

He’s too good for me, she thinks more than once. Too lovely for words. 

There is no sign of the other shoe dropping, but she keeps waiting.

~*~ 

It’s only a slender bit of chain and tiny pieces of colored glass that sparkle when they catch the light. Not real gold or anything, he knows that—he couldn’t afford anything as expensive as that and he hadn’t bought it in a proper shop, but the market stalls in Cairo had been quite nice. When he had spotted it, she had been his first thought. Delicate and gold and green glass the exact color of the sea and her eyes. He had known right then he had to have it.

He loves giving presents nearly as much as other people love getting them, which is brilliant because that feeling when you surprise someone with a gift when they haven’t expected one and there’s no reason for it, is one of the best feelings in the world—better even than apple-tossing and perfectly warmed baths. It’s more than just the present, though (not that the present isn’t brilliant in and of itself, but it’s not the most important bit), it’s the thought behind it, and the realization that just that bit of thought can make someone else so marvelously happy.

One thing he’s beginning to realize is that more than anything he wants Keely to be happy.

~*~

The last thing he expects to do is upset her.

The corners of her eyes are tight and her mouth is pulled into a quivering frown like she can’t quite decide whether to shout or cry. Eventually she just breaths his name like it’s a mistake and he knows he’s done something terribly wrong.

He drops the bracelet back into its box and sits there stupidly, because he has no idea how to fix what he’s done. He doesn’t even know _what_ he’s done, but that doesn’t matter because he’s done it and it was wrong and now he has to put it right, even if he doesn’t have a clue about where to begin.

Best to begin at the beginning then, isn’t it?

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I just thought you’d like it. It reminded me of you.”

If anything, his apology makes it worse and she flinches from his gaze.

“Don’t be sorry,” she tells him. “It… It was very thoughtful of you. It’s beautiful.”

Like you, he wants to add, but he remembers he’s trying for diplomacy and says instead, “Then why don’t you like it?”

She twists her fingers together, tangles them until all he wants to do is reach over and unknot them, hold her hands in his to reassure her and make up for being such a clot.

“I do like it, Arthur. Really I do. But…” Her fingers knot themselves tighter until her knuckles stand out, pale and stark. “You really shouldn’t have.”

“I wanted to,” he insists. Because he did. It is as simple as that.

That is the wrong answer. Her nails cut into her skin until they leave marks and she ducks her head so that her hair falls down across her shoulders and shadows her face. All at once, he knows she’s hiding and he’s the reason why.

The goodbye she gives him is quick and stumbled and when she leaves it’s as though she can’t get away from him fast enough.

He watches her go at a loss, the bracelet box a lead weight in his palm.

~*~

Too good, she knows. Far too good.

Arthur’s disappointment cuts into her like a knife and murders the truth. 

The fact that she can see his kindness as another man’s acrimony twists the knife that much deeper. Where she knows there is only compassion, she twists it instead into ulterior motive and shies away.

She remembers the pattern all too well. Empty words to soothe away a hurt. Trinkets to atone for an indiscretion. Doting and indulgence to stuff down the guilt and wipe the slate clean.

That anyone could ever see Arthur as a liar and a thief is unfathomable. That she considers it even for a moment churns her stomach and she begins to crumble. In that moment she is broken, taken apart by her own impotence and someone else’s deceit. 

The doubt lingers. 

~*~

Skip is the one who finds him, sitting on the old, splintering picnic table out on the spit of green next to the portacabin. He supposes if anyone were to find him it’s best that it’s Skip, because Skip takes one look at his face and at the box in his hand, and doesn’t say a word. Skip just takes off his cap, sits beside him with folded hands, and waits.

It’s a long time before he speaks, but when he does his voice is quiet and hoarse. Confused and devastated. “I thought I was doing something _good_ ,” he says. “But it was the total opposite. I ruined it.”

“I’m sure you didn’t,” Skip tells him.

More than anything he wants to believe that it’s true. But he pictures Keely’s face, her trembling frown and her clenched fingers, remembers her avoiding his eyes and fleeing. Wanting to believe isn’t enough.

“She was scared,” Arthur breathes. “Of me.”

“Or,” Skip suggests gently. “Perhaps, she was scared of what you have to offer.”

When Arthur turns to see if Skip has gone completely mad, Skip is staring out across the airfield, eyes locked on a Cessna making its circuits, looping back again and again.

“Sometimes,” Skip says slowly. “Sometimes just knowing that there’s someone who… who cares about you is terrifying. Because you don’t know how you can possibly deserve it, and they still care about you anyway.”

“But that’s just stupid,” Arthur says. “Everybody deserves that.”

Skip doesn’t look away from the Cessna, but his folded hands tighten in his lap for an instant.

“You’d be surprised at just how many people think they don’t,” Skip says.

They sit in silence until the Cessna completes its run. Arthur tries to figure out how the truth could ever make him feel so sick.

~*~

It feels odd to continue on as if nothing has happened, as if the world hasn’t suddenly gone askew and they’re left trying to find a new balance, but Keely doesn’t bring it up again, and Arthur can’t find it in him to broach the subject. He knows better than to mention that the bracelet is still stuffed in his coat pocket because he can’t bear to see it sit on his bureau like a broken promise.

They’re both pretending, he thinks, to make things better. 

None of it makes things better at all.

But he won’t scare her again. When she’s ready she’ll tell him and he’ll be there to listen, for hours and hours if that’s what she needs.

She deserves that and he wants her to believe it.

~*~

Things finally fall apart after dinner and a film.

They’re curled up together on the sofa watching old world spies with their Cold War secrets, and the isolation of all their lives strikes a chord in Arthur. The reticence, the seclusion. Nothing at all like James Bond. No fancy gadgets or ravishing femme fatales. He doesn’t imagine there’s much glamour in espionage if the only trust you can find is at the bottom of a bottle.

It’s utterly depressing.

“Everything okay?” Keely asks. 

No, he thinks. Nothing is okay. That’s the problem. 

“I feel sorry for them,” he says instead, gesturing at the telly. “Their whole lives are made up of secrets and lies and they can’t even trust their own friends. It’s horrible.”

She blinks at him and reaches for the remote, confused. “We don’t have to watch the rest, if you don’t want to.”

He shrugs and she pauses the film, then twists under his arm to stare up at him. The fingers on his chest are hesitant and she sinks her teeth into her bottom lip before meeting his eyes. “Did… Did I do something?” she hedges. “Are you upset with me?”

He can’t decide, because all at once he is and he isn’t and he doesn’t know why. All he wants is things between them to be okay, but how can they manage that if they never say anything? They’re like those they faithless spies with their unglamorous and lonely lives and the secrecy is unraveling him.

He has no idea how to tell her any of that.

Instead, he pulls her against him and kisses her until he doesn’t have any breath left. She sweeps her thumbs along his jawline, threading her fingers through his hair, and slowly melts against him. 

She isn’t close enough.

He eases her away so he can sit up, so he can hold her face in his hands and kiss her like she’s the only thing that matters. 

He kisses her so he can make her believe that she is.

If he can’t say anything to convince her, he can show her.

~*~

He isn’t rough with her, but that’s not what startles her. The urgency is what unsteadies her and sends her reeling. She tries to keep up, wants to, but slowly, surely she feels like she’s drowning and there isn’t enough air anymore.

Her back hits the sofa cushions, and he’s gentle, oh-so gentle, but the weight of him is crushing. Her breathing is shallow and gasping in her lungs. She knows that despite how her heart is hammering behind her ribs that she is absolutely fine. But then his hands are on her wrists, feather-light and caressing, and pinning her in place.

She rips her hands from his and fights until she’s standing in the middle of the floor, breathless and trembling.

The horror etched on his face is shattering.

She refuses to let herself fall to pieces because she’s the one who put it there.

~*~

“Keely,” he breathes, because he can’t find his voice to be any louder. “I’m sorry.”

She stiffens at his words, whipcord and steel and gaping fault lines. 

“It’s all right,” she says. 

The world unbalances again. Everything is far from all right, the furthest it can possibly be. The lie is horrendous and she must know it, because she refuses to meet his eyes. He doesn’t think if he were standing in her shoes that he could look himself in the eye either. Slowly, carefully as he can, he climbs to his feet and stays well away from her on his way to the door.

Her voice freezes him in his tracks.

“I’m a wreck,” she says. “I try not to be, but it doesn’t work.”

He turns back to look at her, at the rigid line of her spine, at her hands curled into trembling, white-knuckled fists. She is willing herself back together and it breaks his heart. 

“You’re not a wreck,” he tells her.

The laugh that leaves her throat is strangled and bitter, and he knows with absolute certainty that nothing will repair the damage that’s been done. He wavers at the door caught between wanting to try anyway, and doing the right thing and leaving.

“It wasn’t you,” she says, and it sounds like she’s pleading, begging him to believe her.

So he does. “Do you want me to stay?”

Some of the tension bleeds from her and silently, she nods.

He walks back until he’s standing beside her, with just enough distance between them to be welcoming rather than avoidant.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Not a demand, a suggestion, to let her know the choice is hers and he won’t force the matter.

It takes her a long while to reply. “Malcolm,” she says finally. He pauses, confused, but she continues before the question ever makes it to his tongue. “He’s the reason I moved to Fitton. To get away from him. Thinks he owns the whole world, everything and everyone. I couldn’t do it anymore.” 

He never thought it was possible to sound so deadened, but the words are hollow and cold. Distant. All at once, he hears the unspoken confession and he aches. 

“Oh, Keely. I’m so sorry.”

The fault lines gape into fissures and her composure crumbles. “He… He hurt me.”

He can’t see her face, but he can hear the tears in her voice, can see the last bits of her resolve fall away. “He shouldn’t have,” he tells her, “And I’m so sorry that he did. Because it wasn’t right of him. At all.” Because it’s true and she need to believe it. _He_ needs her to believe it. 

He brushes his fingers against her arm and she goes to pieces.

Never again, he thinks as he holds her and she sobs. Never again. The vow burns beneath his skin and sinks into his bones.

Later, when the last of her tears have dried up, she clings to him and unsettles him, smothers him with kisses and drags him to bed. But he can feel the lie in the fingers she has curled around his hand, feel it in their trembling. He can see it in the stiffness of her shoulders and in the tearstains still drying on her cheeks. She’s trying to be brave, but the pretending makes her brittle.

He won’t ever be the one to break her.

Gently as he can, he pulls away and in a flash he sees the hesitation and the doubt in her eyes. He cups her face in his hands and kisses her, softly and sweetly, a touch simply for its own sake. Then he pulls back the blankets and they crawl beneath the sheets together. 

“I like _this_ ,” he says, as he settles behind her and kisses her shoulder. He drapes his arm over her and after a moment her fingers curl around his wrist. 

“Picture yourself in a boat on a river,” he softly sings. 

He stays awake and keeps watch long after she’s fallen asleep.

~*~

When Keely wakes up the room is hazy with pre-dawn light. Hindbrain panic kicks in when she realizes she isn’t alone, that there is a solid body pressed up against her back and a heavy arm thrown over her waist to cage her in.

Then Arthur mumbles something incomprehensible in his sleep and all the paralyzing fear dribbles from her spine. She listens to him breathe, deep and even, and for the first time in a long time, she feels _safe_.

She closes her eyes and wills herself back to sleep to make the feeling last.

~*~

The sun on his face is finally what makes Arthur open his eyes. Keely is still curled in his arms, fast asleep. A careful check of the alarm clock tells him it’s nearly noon, but he lies back down and breathes in the fruity-soap scent of Keely’s hair. 

The waking world can wait.

~*~

Eventually, he drags himself out of bed, careful not to wake Keely, and pads down the hall to the kitchen. When he at last has a cup of coffee in him, he stands at the worktop and wonders what in the world he’s going to do. This is all far beyond anything he has in his power to undo, and even if he could he has no idea where to start.

So he does the only thing he can. He makes breakfast.

~*~

When he goes back to the bedroom, Keely is awake and sitting up in the empty space he left. Startled, she looks up at him with sleep-tousled hair and smudged make-up around her eyes, and it strikes him that she might have thought he’d gone. 

He just smiles at her and holds up the tray in his hands. “Hope you don’t mind,” he says. “I helped myself. Could never resist a good breakfast in bed.”

Her face scrunches up for just an instant, but then she’s shaking her head and he can’t see her eyes under her hair. When he sits on the edge of the bed beside her, she wraps her arms around him and presses her forehead to the back of his neck. It takes a bit of maneuvering to set the tray on the floor without toppling her with him, but he manages well enough. He opens his arms to pull her into a hug and she surprises him by slithering into his lap. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” he whispers into her hair.

When she lifts her head her eyes are wet, but she’s smiling, and soft as can be, she cradles his jaw in her hands and presses a chaste kiss to his lips. Content, he rests his forehead against hers, closes his eyes, and runs his hands over her back.

When she squeaks, they both jump. 

His hands pause on her waist and he leans his head back to grin up at her. “Are you ticklish?”

“No,” she insists, even as she pulls away. “Absolutely not.”

He runs his fingers up her side and she twitches. “Oh, I see,” he says. “Maybe we should put that theory to the test just in case.” 

He tickles her until she shrieks, until she is a breathless, giggling mess and can’t even get out the words properly to tell him to stop. Eventually, she manages to bat him away and wage an attack of her own. He fends off her hands halfheartedly, trying his best for stoicism and failing, squawking whenever she manages to crooks her fingers against his sides. It doesn’t matter though. The sight of her smile chases away the memory of her tears. That alone is more than worth it.

She tumbles him over onto his back and he lets her, lets her follow him down until she straddles his hips and grins triumphantly down at him.

“I win,” she tells him. 

There is nothing easier in the world than conceding defeat.

When she kisses him it leaves him breathless and wanting. But he won’t push, won’t ever take more than she’s willing to give. He wants her, happy and whole, and he’ll wait until the end of forever if he has to. He rests his hands on her thighs and tries to remember how to breathe.

“Whatever you want,” he tells her. Anything and everything, it’s hers.

She kisses his collarbone, the hinge of his jaw, his temple. Then she sits up and rests her hands against his chest so that his heart thrums against her fingers.

“You,” is all she says. 

All the brittle pretending between them turns to dust and the truth it leaves behind is a marvelous relief. He cranes his neck to kiss her because he doesn’t need words. She’s had him all along.

They make love in the sunlight streaming in from the window and stay tangled in each other’s arms long after their breakfast has gone cold.

~*~

Eventually, the waking world makes itself known, and when it does Keely lets it come bleeding back into the forefront. She forgets sometimes that life goes on, forgets that she’s allowed to be a part of it. It’s all risk, she thinks. 

She watches Arthur putter around her flat and decides maybe it’s a risk worth taking.

~*~

MJN’s next trip out is to Sweden. They spend two days in Stockholm while their client brokers some sort of deal with clients of his own. Mr. Thwaites is cordial, if not a bit dismissive, but he isn’t overtly rude. He’s a lawyer or a stockbroker or possibly even an alchemist for all Arthur knows, trading in commodities or settlements or some such things. Whatever it is though, it must be important and fairly hush-hush because Mr. Thwaites buries himself in his paperwork and doesn’t speak a word about any of it. 

Arthur is suddenly reminded again of spies. Mr. Thwaites doesn’t strike Arthur as the James Bond type, so he must be the other sort, cold and distrustful and lonely. 

Arthur immediately feels sorry for him.

~*~

On the flight home, there is something not quite right about Mr. Thwaites. Arthur thinks perhaps his negotiations didn’t go as well as they should have, because he is quieter than he was on the flight in (which shouldn’t be all that odd considering his default seems to be succinctness rather than verbosity) and he doesn’t smile (not that Arthur took him for much of a smiley man in the first place). Whatever it is Arthur can’t put his finger on it. 

When Mr. Thwaites calls, Arthur dismisses the off-kilter feeling niggling at the back of his mind and fetches him another tumbler of whiskey.

~*~

They get back to Fitton sometime before lunch. While, Skip and Douglas finish up the checks, Arthur escorts Mr. Thwaites off the plane and hears him swear.

“Something wrong, sir?” Arthur asks. 

Mr. Thwaites stands on GERTI’s steps glaring at his mobile. “Damn thing’s gone flat.”

“That’s all right,” Arthur says. “You can use the phone in our office.”

“That bit of metal that barely qualifies as shed across the way?”

Just as he was taught, Arthur ignores the insult and simply nods. “That’s it. If you’ll just give me a moment, I’ll take you right over.”

Mr. Thwaites saunters down the rest of the steps, gazes out across the tarmac, and pauses. “No need,” he says distractedly. “Private phone call in any case. The door will be open, yes?”

Without waiting for an answer, Mr. Thwaites strides away. 

Arthur shrugs and goes to wrestle down the luggage from the overhead locker.

~*~

Keely spends her day off waiting in the airfield canteen. She’s not supposed to, technically, but the ground crew all know her well enough and Carl, sweet man that he is, has one of the YTS lads come fetch her as soon as GERTI’s tyres touch down on the runway. 

She stands outside MJN’s portacabin, giddy and full to bursting. It’s her turn to surprise Arthur for once.

“Keely Noonan?” someone calls. “I’ll be damned. I thought it was you.”

All at once, recollection chills her blood, but reaction to hearing her own name makes her look up anyway. Hindbrain panic overwhelms her and she freezes, even when everything in her screams to run.

What good would that do? the tiny sliver of sense left in her thinks. There’s nowhere else to go.

~*~

Arthur throws Mr. Thwaites bags over his shoulder and makes his way to the portacabin. He expects Mr. Thwaites to already be inside, busy making his important phone call, but instead he’s idling by the door with someone else. It takes Arthur a moment to realize that someone is Keely, who shifts uncomfortably away from Mr. Thwaites, stilling disconcertingly when he stands far too close. 

Drunk, Arthur thinks. Drunk and flirting. Posh types always flirt with pretty girls like their entitled to it. Arthur reminds himself of that and tries not to let it bother him so badly. He’s doing a rather good job of it, he thinks, until Mr. Thwaites cages Keely between his arms and the portacabin, and she flinches.

That’s when Arthur remembers the passenger manifest and that Mr. Thwaites first name is Malcolm.

~*~

“Thought you dropped off the face of the earth,” Malcolm laughs. “Just up and left. I know we had our differences, but I thought I warranted a proper goodbye, at least.”

The very least, Keely wants to scream. Instead she tells him, “I need to go back to work,” and hates herself for the weakness in her voice, the hesitation and the plea.

“What? That’s it? Don’t I deserve a little more?”

How can he deserve more when he took everything the first time? “I’m going to be late,” is all she manages to say.

“You and your fucking work. Haven’t changed a bit,” he snarls. “Fine, then.” But he doesn’t move away. Instead he presses closer and dips his head down to catch her gaze. The smile he gives her turns her stomach. “But give us a kiss before you dash off. For old time’s sake.”

He’s so close now she can smell the whiskey on his breath, cheap and vile. The scent of his cologne clings to the back of her throat like a film, burns a line down to her stomach where it sits like a stone. He’s too big to push away, always was. The resignation is bitter and curls her hands in to bloodless fists, but she closes her eyes and tilts her face up to him and gives in to the inevitable.

He crushes his mouth against hers exactly like she knew he would, because he has never been gentle. When his fingers dig into her biceps hard enough to leave marks, she doesn’t flinch. He takes her stillness for acquiescence—or maybe he doesn’t and doesn’t give a damn either way. He takes because it’s who he is, because he doesn’t expect a fight and she has never given him one. 

He takes because it’s easy and she lets him.

He knots a hand into her hair, pulls until she has to crane her neck back. He told her once that he liked the way she looked up at him, liked the way it bared her throat and made her delicate. He told her it was sexy. She knows now he really liked it because it let him rest his fingers against her pulse points just hard enough to remind her that he had it in him to snap her neck and didn’t. It was a show of dominance and of self-restraint, a silent proclamation of just how deeply he cared for her.

Possession, never passion, and he never once let her forget it.

Just like every time before, he tightens his fingers and urges her lips apart. She can’t ignore the lingering burn of whiskey on his tongue.

When he finally pulls away, his breath is rank and hot on her face. “Forgot how good you taste,” he whispers, nuzzling against her cheek.

She despises herself right down to her marrow.

~*~

Arthur can count on one hand the times he’s actually been in a physical fight. Something he’s learned over the years is that even if he has no tactical advantage, he has stature on his side. Most people aren’t entirely keen on starting a row with someone weightier and a head taller than they are, no matter how dim that person might be. 

He has never been particularly prone to rages and growing up he was taught violence never solves anything. But then he remembers Emily Welch from school, how the rest of his classmates had constantly teased her for her braces, how one day Robbie Cartwright had pulled at Emily’s blonde braids so they snarled in his fingers until they came undone and she cried. 

He doesn’t remember anything after that except for his fist connecting with Robbie’s teeth, and how _good_ it had felt because it stopped Emily crying. It didn’t matter that he almost got expelled and his knuckles ached for days afterwards. 

There are too many emotions thudding through Arthur’s veins, just like there were then. The fury boils just under his skin.

He doesn’t feel sorry for Mr. Thwaites anymore.

“Did you have a chance to make your phone call yet, sir?” he asks.

He catches a glimpse of Keely’s face when Mr. Thwaites turns, pale and strained. She meets his gaze with eyes as wide as saucers and the fury in him simmers into something colder, harder. Faintly, he realizes the reason he doesn’t fight is because he has everything he needs to break someone curled in his fists.

Without a word, Keely slides out from under Mr. Thwaites arms and bolts like a skittish animal. Startled, Mr. Thwaites reaches out to pull her back, but Arthur throws his bags down in front of his feet so he stumbles and slaps his hand away.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Thwaites snaps.

“Stay away from her.” 

“I’m sorry?” Mr. Thwaites straightens and narrows his eyes. “I believe who I speak to is _my_ business. Besides we were just catching up. Keely and I go way back.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Mr. Thwaites stares for a long moment, consideringly. “Do you mean to tell me—God,” he laughs. “You’re the reason she scarpered? Really? Well then. If that’s the case let me give you a piece of advice.” He lays a heavy hand on Arthur’s shoulder. “Invest in a gag. She always was the weepy sort, like fucking some sort of martyr. Then again…” He smiles. “She was always good on her knees.”

There is something viscerally satisfying about the squelching crunch and the yowl of pain when Arthur’s fist connects with Mr. Thwaites’s face. 

The blood on his knuckles feels like recompense. 

~*~

The hangar is practically deserted when Martin locks up GERTI. A lone engineer rushes past, the radio on his belt crackling with a call for security. Martin catches bits and pieces of the call through the static, but the most important thing is quite clear. 

He shouts for Douglas and makes a mad dash for the portacabin, praying.

~*~

The damage takes hours to undo.

Security makes assessments and takes statements while the paramedics clean away the blood, and slap on ointments and bandages. Everyone is wary of the raging man in the dirty thousand pound suit, who won’t shut up and give anyone a moment’s peace. There are accusations of assault and thinly-veiled threats of lawsuit, liability for both charter firm and airfield.

Martin sits by Arthur’s side and lets Douglas do all the talking. 

“Douglas will sort this,” Martin says, doing his best to be reassuring.

He can’t tell if it’s the bruising or not that makes Arthur look so grim.

~*~

Despite the paramedics assurances and a sudden and surprising bout of mulish stubbornness from Arthur, Douglas refuses to let Arthur drive home. He bundles him into his Lexus, and without being told, Martin follows behind in Arthur’s Corsa. 

Carolyn is waiting for them when they get there, incensed and distraught.

“You idiot boy,” she snaps, even as she takes Arthur’s face in her hands. “What have you done?” She knows even before he tells her what the reason is, sees it in the steeliness of his gaze, feels it in the tension and the pain radiating off from him.

“He hurt Keely,” he tells her.

Simple, matter-of-fact, and unequivocally sober in a way her son never deserves to be. She herds him into the kitchen, plies him with tea and painkillers, and waits for the fallout. 

~*~

Keely lies in bed and never wants to get up again. She should scream and break everything she touches just to see it shatter, become a mad and raving thing so she can tear out her hair and sink bloody furrows into her arms.

Because the only one to blame for all of this is her and she deserves to hurt for it.

She doesn’t do any of those things.

Instead, she stays curled on her mattress and scrabbles to find any lingering embers of hatred to keep her warm. But the only thing left in her is emptiness.

She will stay here and waste away, she thinks. Shrivel up to only bones and eventually fade to dust. That would be easiest, wouldn’t it? Succumb to an endless sleep of no more dreaming and never again face the waking world. 

Dusk brings orange light slanting into her bedroom, falling across the end of the bed, a lifeline she doesn’t want to reach for. She turns her back on it, and suddenly she smells him on the sheets. It takes her one nauseating panic-gripped moment to realize the scent is coming from her.

Movement is as easy as breathing then and comes in a frenzy.

She strips the bed of linens, drags them down the hall and leaves them in a pile in the sitting room. It’s the next best thing to burning them, so it will have to do. Then she strips herself. The shower she takes is long and the water so hot it scalds. She scours herself raw, until every inch of her is tender-red and burning, and doesn’t step out until the water runs cold.

She doesn’t bother with drying off and instead slinks back to the bedroom because she can’t bear to see herself in the mirror. Blindly, she stands by her wardrobe and wobbles as she pulls on her clothes. 

That’s when she sees the jumper.

It’s stupid and selfish and she doesn’t deserve it in the least, but she pulls it on anyway, buries herself in it. It smells like Arthur, like sugar sweetness and kind words. She curls in the middle of her stripped bed and imagines he’s with her, thinks about his arms around her, and how he would whisper it was okay and she would believe him.

That’s all she has now. He won’t want her, not after this. Who would? She doesn’t even want herself, doesn’t want to think or feel or be inside her own skin.

She’s alone again and she deserves every moment of it.

Still, she pretends he’s with her and cries herself to sleep.

~*~

It is depressingly dark and storming when Arthur wakes up the next morning. The rain pounds at his window and paints water-shadows on the floor and over his duvet. Sunless and echoing and if not for the pain he could close his eyes and sleep for a year. Every last inch of him throbs, stiff and dulled, from his fingertips down to his toes. He knows for a fact that nothing is broken, but even still he feels shattered and it hurts to breathe.

There is paracetamol on his bedside table and a glass of water. He swallows down both, then closes his eyes and concentrates very hard on not moving. For a while, he lies there, waiting for the painkillers to kick in. The pain won’t allow him to go back to sleep until the edge has worn away, so he loses himself in the distant peels of thunder and the occasional flash of lightning that flares behind his eyelids. 

Maybe, he thinks, if he lies here long enough, he’ll wake up and everything will have just been a bad dream. Eventually, the pain ebbs, but the storm rumbles on and drives away sleep.

He lies in bed and aches.

~*~

He surprises Mum, when he shambles into the kitchen later, hollowed out and sick to his stomach. He makes himself a cup of tea, despite her fussing, but when he goes to drink, his jaw cramps. He slumps back against the worktop in defeat, holds his mug in both hands and breathes in the steam. 

“I’m fine,” he mumbles when he catches Mum staring. 

She just scoffs and fixes her attention on the paper spread out on the table. “Finely ground, perhaps,” she says. “You looks as if you threw yourself through a meat grinder."

He feels just about the same, but he doesn’t think it merits mentioning. “I’m sorry,” he offers instead.

Mum raises her head and looks him straight in the eyes. “No, you’re not,” she says plainly. “And if given the choice, you’d do the same again.” She holds his gaze a moment longer, then furiously picks up the paper and cracks it open before her like a shield. It’s signal for conversation over, but he knows it’s really to hide all the anger and anxiety she doesn’t want him to see.

He cradles his mug to his chest, letting the warmth seep through his shirt, and manages a grimace that can pass for a smile.

After he finishes his tea, he pauses at the table, and lays his hand on her shoulder. 

She doesn’t take her eyes from the newsprint, but she relaxes her unrelenting grip on the business section. “At least tell me it was worth it,” she says.

“She is.” 

She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t say another word, but in the silence he can hear her approval.

~*~

The rubbish weather makes him miserable but the measured doses of painkillers manage at last to keep the pain away. He sits on the sofa fiddling with his phone and the remote in turn. After Douglas and Skip had explained things to Mum while he sat huddled in an unsightly mess at the kitchen table, he had tried texting Keely, just to see if she was all right, but she never answered. By the time Mum had finished shouting and worrying, he had been too exhausted to try and ring her.

He taps out a text and waits.

An hour drags by with no response. When he tries phoning, the call goes straight to voicemail. He frowns, sinking into the sofa cushions, and wonders if he has the energy to get dressed. He waits another fifteen minutes before he comes to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter if he does, and gets dressed anyway.

He places a hastily scribbled note in the dish in the hall were they keep the keys and the post and leaves as quietly as he’s able, before Mum has the chance to guilt him back into bed.

~*~

He has to park around the corner from Keely’s flat. By the time he makes it to the door, he’s soaked to the bone and positively freezing because he forgot to bring an umbrella and every time he shivers his muscles start to ache again. 

He hunches up inside his coat and rings the bell. 

No one answers. 

He waits, breathing on his hands and rubbing them together to keep the feeling in his fingers before he tries again. He knows she must be home because her car is parked at the kerb, and she isn’t stupid enough to go out in weather like this. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk. Maybe she doesn’t want to see him.

He tries the bell again.

Ten minutes later, he is still huddled in the doorway when a neighbor comes by and lets him in with a commiserated, “Forget your key?”

Arthur gives a noncommittal shrug, rushes inside and stands on the hall rugs dripping until he can feel his toes again. The climb up to Keely’s flat takes ages and by the time he’s standing at her door all he wants to do is crawl back in bed, bury himself under the covers, and not come out again until everything stops hurting. 

He knocks on the door and waits. 

And waits.

And waits.

“Keely, it’s me,” he calls. “I tried ringing you, but you didn’t answer. I just want to know you’re all right, okay?” He pauses, listening, but the only thing he hears is the rhythmic drip of water from his clothes. “If you don’t want to talk that’s okay, you don’t have to, I understand. But maybe you could just open the door, so I could see you, just for minute?”

Silence. 

He rests his forehead against the door in defeat. “Please,” he whispers.

A moment later the security chain rattles and the locks tumble back. The door opens and Keely is on the other side of it, looking small and wretched and dazed. 

“Hello,” he says.

The second she sees his face, she blanches and the glassy glaze to her eyes disappears. “Oh my god.” She reaches up to touch him, but stops and shrinks into herself. She’s running away again, hiding from him and he hates it. 

But still he asks “Can I come in?” because the choice has always been hers and he’ll never take it from her.

After a long drawn-out moment, she stands aside to let him in. “I’m sorry,” she says, her voice fragile and whisper-small. 

All he hears is the guilt. “Don’t be,” he says with more humor than he actually feels. “You should see the other guy.”

For a minute he can’t figure out if she’s crying or laughing. When he realizes it’s both, he goes to pull her into his arms, but stops awkwardly when he remembers he’s still sopping wet. He reaches out to rub his hands along her arms instead and she leans into his touch.

“I thought you wouldn’t want to see me anymore,” she says.

The notion is so utterly ridiculous all can he manage is a stupidly bewildered, “Why?”

“Because.” She shudders and takes a breath to steady herself. “Because of what happened. At the airfield,” she adds, as if she needs to clarify.

“But why would I not want to see _you?_ That doesn’t make any sense. If anything, I wouldn’t want to see him, and really, I don’t think I will.”

She just stares up at him at a loss. “How can you be so…?”

“Idiotic,” he supplies.

“Absolutely wonderful.”

That takes him by surprise, not because he’s flattered (though, he is, a bit), but because what he really hears is _How can you be so absolutely wonderful to me?_ There are so many answers he can give, ones long enough to tangle themselves up until they lose all their meaning and dissolve into utter nonsense. 

But what it really comes down to is just three simple words, something he thinks he has known all along and has been too stupid to say. The knowledge is exhilarating and freeing in the way most truths are.

Because she’s absolutely wonderful too and he can’t understand why she can’t see that.

“I love you,” he tells her. 

Because it’s what she deserves and she needs to know that.

For one endless, precarious moment, the world balances on the head of a pin. Then she’s throwing her arms around his neck and clinging to him—which would be quite lovely if only he didn’t still ache so badly.

He doesn’t manage to cover up his sharp intake of breath or his wince, and she pulls away immediately, the apology already falling from her tongue.

“It’s okay,” he soothes. “Still a bit tender, that’s all.”

“That you’re still dripping probably isn’t helping either.” She stands, taking stock of him as if for the first time, then decisively eases his coat from his shoulders gently as can be. 

He stops her when he hears a familiar rattle, takes out the jewelry box that has sat in his pocket for weeks, and offers it to her again.

“This is a gift,” he tells her. “Because I wanted to, not because I expect anything from it, because that isn’t what a gift is. I thought it was beautiful and I wanted you to have it. That’s all.”

This time, she doesn’t hide and run. To his delight, she simply holds out her hand. He fumbles with the clasps for a second, but when he finally fastens it, it is all the more beautiful for being on her wrist, where it sits like a promise kept.

Her “thank you” is almost too quiet to hear and she swipes furiously at her eyes. “I’ll get you a towel,” she says and disappears down the hall.

He wanders into the kitchen and sets about making a pot of coffee to unthaw his insides. This isn’t anything like what fairy tales make it out to be, loving someone. The stories all says it’s magic, and it is, he supposes, of a sort. But it’s not a bewitching enchantment to ensnare a lover’s heart or a spell worn powerful by true love’s kiss. Those things make it out to be both far more complicated and much too effortless than it really is.

It is simple fact, steadfast and irrefutable. It may not be perfect, but it’s his and it’s real and that’s what matters most.

When the water boils, he fixes up two mugs, then curls his hands around one so the warmth from the ceramic seeps into his fingertips. Keely slips into the kitchen a moment later, drapes the towel she has around his shoulders, and uses it to pull him down for a kiss, soft and sweet and all he could ever dream of wanting.

This is it, he thinks. This is his happily ever after. 

It starts with a cup of coffee.

**Author's Note:**

> Edited for title change, because I could, and I like it much better.


End file.
